Gender and sexuality
Birkbeck’s Department of English and Humanities offers a broad perspective on the interdisciplinary study of gender and sexuality and has become a hub for researchers working within the field.
Department experts
- Heike Bauer: Heike Bauer’s research and teaching interests focus on nineteenth and early twentieth-century literature and culture, and the histories and theories of sexuality and gender. She has published on sexology, female and male same-sex sexuality, translation and cultural exchange, and on questions of gender, “race” and discipline formation. Her publications include English Literary Sexology: Translations of Inversion 1860-1930 (Palgrave 2009) and Women and Cross-Dressing, 1800-1930 (Routledge, 2006).
- Isabel Davis: Isabel Davis’s research interests are focused on the literature and culture of the later Middle Ages. In particular she has published on issues surrounding gender, sexuality and the household. Her latest monograph, Writing Masculinity in the Later Middle Ages, looks at cultures of masculinity in a period of labour crisis.
- Hilary Fraser: Hilary Fraser's research interests range widely in the nineteenth century. Her most recent book is Gender and the Victorian Periodical (with Judith Johnston and Stephanie Green, Cambridge University Press, 2003). Earlier books include Beauty and Belief: Aesthetics and Religion in Victorian Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1986), The Victorians and Renaissance Italy (Blackwell, 1992), English Prose of the Nineteenth Century (with Daniel Brown, Longman Literature in English Series, 1997).
- Aoife Monks: Aoife Monks specialises in theatre and performance studies. Her research includes: costume, fashion and materiality in the theatre; the histories and cultures of cross-dressing; the work of contemporary female theatre directors; emigration and tourism in the performance of Irishness; oratory and theatricality; contemporary uses of Shakespeare in performance, death, ghosts and objects in performance; and Naturalism. She publishes and works through practice as research, and as a volunteer and researcher for the theatre charity Scene and Heard. Her monograph 'The Actor in Costume' is forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan. She has published extensively on the work of the theatre director Deborah Warner, the theatre company Wooster Group, gender and performance, and Riverdance and St Patrick's Day.
- Laura Salisbury: Laura Salisbury's research and teaching interests include modernist, postmodernist and contemporary fiction; modernity and the contemporary; poststructuralism; philosophies of temporality, ethics and affect; psychoanalysis; gender and language; neuroscience and language.
Carol Watts: Carol Watts specialises in eighteenth-century and contemporary literature and culture, and teaches, writes and supervises across this range, including work on US literature, film and poetics. - Joanne Winning: Joanne Winning has research interests in twentieth-century and twenty-first-century literatures, culture and theory, and particularly in relation to gender and sexuality. Specific interests include: the modernisms of the early twentieth century, especially female and lesbian modernism; lesbian subjectivities and cultural production; psychoanalysis and its theories; architecture, design and theories of space.
- Susan Wiseman: Sue Wiseman’s research interests are in Renaissance and seventeenth-century writing and culture. Specific interests include ideas of change and transformation in the period 1550-1750; writing of the early seventeenth century, writing of the Civil War, and of the Restoration, women’s literary and political writing, writing and politics.
Relevant courses
- BA Theatre Studies and English / BA Theatre Studies and Humanities
- MA Gender, Sexuality and Culture / MSc Gender, Sexuality and Society
- MA Shakespeare and Contemporary Performance
- MPhil/PhD degrees: you can expect world-class supervision from our departmental experts.
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